Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
...

Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

This topic is coming up again on the foreign news, but still ignored here.

In the last days of the H.W. Bush admin and the early days of the Clinton era, well-meaning American lawyers from Boston and Washington rushed to Europe to help draft the new constitutions and treaties that defined the post-Cold War European era. Amongst those laws and treaties was a curious example of the enlightenment coming home–American lawyers writing natural law into European code. One of those items of natural law was the concept that the freedom from government prying was an individual human right. This was designed to end the era of secret police, and the definition of who cannot spy on whom was unbelievably broad. In the past fifteen years, Spanish judges have been incredibly willing to hand down indictments against foreign leaders based on these principles, and the European Union is bound by treaty to enforce arrest warrants issued by those courts.

Over the past five years, this Regime has been doing a lot of nasty things to our allies in Europe and Asia, but one thing it really hasn’t done has cross the line from spying on governments to spying on individual Europeans. The first is “tacky.” The second is a defined crime against humanity.

The revelation that the Obama Regime has been spying on sixty million private Spaniards goes way beyond “tacky.” In fact, the Snowden revelations are yanking the Spanish back to the days of Franco, and they aren’t happy about it. And all its going to take now is one Spanish judge who finds himself on that list of spied-upon Spaniards. Shortly on the list after the wisdom about not getting involved in land wars in Asia is the other truism about not spying on Spaniards in the post Cold War era.

And the Snowden revelations keep coming, and its unlikely that Germany or France or Greece are in any mood to pooh pooh a Spanish arrest warrant for Obama or his Regime’s officials if they find themselves in Europe, or an allied country. This morning on Al Jazeera, it was noted that the Spanish court could hand down a “sealed indictment” that is not disclosed until the time of arrest. Meaning, that American officials, including Obama, could be oblivious of the actions of a spanish court unti the handcuffs come out. Great deterrent for travel for most of the Regime.

I hope Obama likes Skype, because that may be the closest he gets to Europe or Asia for the foreseeable future.